All theater dancing puts extra demands on the body, poses special risks. This is true even of the post-’60s postmodern work that dispensed with dance technique per se. In fact, a lot of the early alternative dance, beginning with Trisha Brown’s equipment pieces and the ultra-real, obsessively repetitive rituals of Kei Takei, imposed theatrical rigor on " natural " and minimalistic movement. Last weekend we could see two different descendants of those anti-academic experiments.

Sound and Butoh, at Green Street Studios, was billed as a " visceral exchange " between musician/visual artist Masashi Harada and dancer Taketeru Kudo. Butoh dance originated in traumatized post-war Japan as an internally generated body practice that probed the deepest questions of identity but skirted the whole psychological/expressive universe inhabited by modern dance. Eventually solo performers grew earthier and less intense, and there were butoh companies that did bizarre spectacles. Kudo seemed closer to butoh’s drastic roots.

As Harada manipulated an assortment of percussion instruments, we could make out a shapeless form on the floor that slowly shuddered into the shape of a man, or parts of a man. It was Kudo, draped in a thick red gauzy garment that looked kind of disgusting, like something you’d see in the debris after a house burns down. He attained an upright posture only after lurching around on his knees, scrambling on his fingertips and toes, falling splat on his face or his skinny buttocks. He pranced back and forth regally but disjointedly, his arms hooked as if they’d been attached the wrong way after a horrible accident.

He made his way to a mat, shrugged off his rags, and squatted down. He groped unseeing until he found some white powdery substance, which he slapped all over his body, a reference to the ghostly make-up butoh dancers often wear. He got up and danced away.

I guess there was supposed to be an interlude — the program called for a 10-minute intermission. After three projector failures, we saw a fast-changing slide show of blobby color arrangements; perhaps they were photos of Harada’s art pieces, which he creates by dripping paint onto melting ice. In the dark, Harada continued bashing at the instruments, sometimes throwing handfuls of stones against cymbals and gongs.

Kudo emerged again out of Shadya Ballug’s shifting, low-level lighting. He seemed to be dressed only in ropes of beads, with which he flagellated himself. Harada played assaultive tone clusters on the piano. Kudo plopped on his mat and twitched convulsively, raising a choking cloud of the powdery white substance. He got up and pranced his dance again, then somehow disappeared. No one knew what to do.

Harada played some more, then got up and told Ballug to turn off the lights. We could hear him walking around the space. Finally the house lights went on. " I can’t find the dancer, " Harada told the audience. " Anyway, supposedly this is the end. " When he’d taken a bow and left, Kudo appeared, naked and knock-kneed, arms dangling, with a twisted grin. He backed toward the door, made a crouching bow as the lights were dimming. Nothing happened. He went out the door and slammed it. The audience applauded.

Butoh is meant to shock, with distortion, horror, even technical derailments, alienating us and imprinting its ghastly images for us to process later. Wire Monkey Dance, at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, was altogether tamer. The company of seven dancers worked in a high metal scaffolding, and like circus performers, they’d mastered the apparatus and learned to move with it. The danger was suggested, the work a metaphor.

The performers in Endangered Species pretended to be animals, acrobats, cartoonish TV watchers, symbolic victims, sexual playmates and rivals, in a series of short scenes. They could tightrope-walk in the structure, balance and swing on it, play follow-the-leader through its bars and ramps. One man — it turned out to be company director Saliq Francis Savage —could use his arms the way breakdancers do, to slow the momentum of his free-falling weight.

Despite its allusions to stressful situations, Endangered Species relied on conventional theatricality, simulated effort, and the signifying possibilities of the set. When stagehands began wheeling the structure — now broken into two big parts — in opposing circles, two women ran alongside, jumping onto the rails, leaning off. I thought of some huge, unstoppable machine. But this was no Hitchcock movie; the apparatus was fairly harmless, and the women could probably have run away if they’d been in any danger.

Issue Date: October 25-31, 2001